


when we’re apart

by hiya_zelda (hiya_girlie)



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, Past Lives, Past Relationships, Reincarnation, Zelink through the ages
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:14:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23471542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hiya_girlie/pseuds/hiya_zelda
Summary: Always together, they were. The princess descended from the goddess and the hero wielding the Bane of Evil’s blade.And when they are apart?What of those times?
Relationships: Link/Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Kudos: 34





	when we’re apart

There are times when he isn’t born, but she is. Eras where the world knows its Princess Zelda but never its Hero Link.

It’s lonely, being a princess, stowed away in the castle, away from the sun. Wouldn’t it be nice to be born to a farmer, who never worried about royal duties, arranged marriages, stuffy nobles? Surely she thinks so. She’s only sixteen yet she feels she knows all she ever needs to about being royalty. You wake up in the morning, get dressed with a team of maids because privacy means nothing to a corset, have breakfast with an emotionally distant father (in some lives he isn’t as bad, and sometimes there’s even a woman at his side, but is it really right to call her mother if she’s hardly there?), sit through meetings where everything goes over your head and your only real purpose is to stay as still as you can, have lunch (or maybe you don’t, in some lives there’s other things that get in the way of lunch), go to class where you get lectured on your life’s purpose, be constantly reminded that the only reason you were conceived is to be a puppet. It’s hell and back again.

But she is born into it, whatever higher power exists (in some lives she’s an atheist and spends far too much time contemplating the reality of gods, but mostly she’s a good girl and learns her religions and follows them) makes sure of it. Time after time she is given a name, always Zelda, and a role, always princess. Never once has her name been Mila, or Eve, or Ulissa. If she has a moment to breathe in between lifetimes she wonders if it’s too hard for the gods to let her change her name. She’s tried doing it herself, but people are weary when confronted with change and tradition is a stickler for details.

Yes, it is quite lonely being a princess with no hero. She’s heard stories of the first Hero, and of the Goddess Hylia. His loyalty to her bound them together for all time and eternity. Why didn't they stay together, then, this time? Is she not deserving of a hero, too?

In the times when no hero is born, when the name Link is nothing but reverent legend, she tries to feel him. Their spirits are connected, souls intertwined, aren’t they? Is it not their destiny to live together and keep the world from falling into the clutches of evil? Does evil simply not exist when the hero isn’t around? Does that mean that the hero is the cause of the evil, and if he simply ceased to exist, then the evil would be gone too? Treasonous thoughts, she thinks, because she is lonely, and although she wishes her land of Hyrule was clean of any imperfection she could not bring herself to live a world without her Hero. She’d already done that enough times for one spirit. Being lonely is painful.

It hurts the worst to be alone when she can remember everything from a past life with him. Her favorite, bittersweet memory is of a distant wedding day. She does not know the era from which it sprang, but it is old, so old that it seems like the edges of the memory crack and fade like an old photograph. Reliving it is a strange sensation, because it is her and yet not her, and it’s him but not him. The wedding is loud and crowded, because she is a princess and it is fitting of her station (in some lives she wonders why it is fitting, does her station of birth determine how elegant her wedding is?) and he is a hero after all, naturally they wouldn’t be able to have a private ceremony.

She can feel, very distinctly, the emotions she must have felt on that day hundreds of years ago. Her palms are slightly sweaty and she didn’t sleep much the previous night due to excitement (in some lives they sneak out together the night before their wedding), but mostly she feels happy, if she can call it that, and satisfied. At the end of the day she loved him (does she know what love is? Not in many of her lifetimes, she rarely sees her fairytale ending), and that was why they were getting married.

It’s a strange thought, knowing a wedding that hasn’t taken place for lifetimes. When she tries to tell people about it, all she gets are strange looks and confused replies. It seems that other people, whose souls are mere fragments and not solid like hers, do not know of events long past. She longs for days that have happened to a different Zelda because she has not had them. Can one be envious of themselves? Is that a logical emotion?

She gets used to it, after a while, the tedious life of a lonely princess. She lives her life as a blank slate almost, simply waiting death to reunite her with her hero. She isn’t suicidal (once, she can recall, she tried to kill herself after a tragic event, but what event, she does not know) and does not wish to die because living alone is better than being dead with someone she doesn’t know how she knows, isn’t it? That’s what she tells herself, anyway.

——

And of course, there are times when he is born, but she isn’t. Eras where the world knows its Hero Link but never its Princess Zelda.

Of course, he isn’t born a hero. How could a baby, unable to care for themselves, be a hero? It is something he grows into, over many years. He doesn’t feel the loneliness like she does, because he is not a princess, rather it is as though he is everything but a princess. He has been a farmer, an orphan, a soldier, he has been a lot of things that he can remember (well, perhaps remember is a strong word, perhaps he will one day find the word to describe how he feels) but he likes being a hero the most. You get to wear green (his favorite color in most lives, though sometimes he likes blue and red, and he can recall liking purple because it was the color of a beautiful girl’s eyes), you have a cool sword (parents, when he has them, are not quick to let him play with swords, he might hurt himself!), there’s total freedom to see the world. Being a hero is much better than being a princess.

But in some lives, when he’s settled down after all the heroics (he marries sometimes, to people that aren’t princesses, and has a family sometimes, he knows that he once had a son with golden blond hair who loved to play in the ocean, was that how he died?) he gets flashes of past lives. He sees the princess and knows that she is his princess, no one else’s. In a strange way, they belong to each other, and to be apart feels odd, like using a new sword or riding a new horse. 

He has the thought, one night, in his current life, that they are two halves of a whole, yes, and that would explain why, no matter how many lives he saves, he still doesn’t feel quite right. Maybe that’s just his mind creating weak excuses to cover up his insecurities, maybe it is an explanation. Always it’s maybe, maybe, maybe.

In this life he is growing tired of being a hero. People see him as equal to the gods and when he corrects them (how could he be a god?) they seem confused (how could he not be a god?) and it gets left at that. Sometimes his heroics go unnoticed, and he gets completely ignored by the world that so desperately needed his help. His blood boils when he thinks of the times his blood has been spilt for people who couldn’t have cared less. HIs skin has seen countless scars and known countless deformities (he lost an eye once, an arm, a leg, he doesn’t like to be a cripple when he knows that he needs to be whole) and for what? To go down in the storybooks, in the legends, as a godlike figure who appears when evil rears its ugly head and emerges victorious? Is the pain worth that?

He feels guilty for being bitter, but it’s what he feels all the time. Bitterness that the times he loved his life were wasted and the times he hated his life were praised. Bitterness that he doesn’t always have his other half, his princess, to aide him, to be with him, to simply exist even if they never meet. Bitterness that though she isn’t alive, he is. Loneliness is perhaps the most terrible of fates, and nine times out of ten he eventually succumbs to it, dying alone in his grief. His soul longs for its partner when she is gone.

But how is he supposed to explain that feeling, that gaping hole in his chest, to people, who are as flimsy as paper in a hurricane when he is as study as a mountain? Once he wished that his soul would die with his body, and was disappointed when it didn’t.

——

“You know, it’s weird,” he tells her in one life when they’re together, “I can’t stand being apart from you.”

He brings it up a lot, his feelings about their interwoven destinies. He hardly talks to anyone as much as he talks to her in this life (he has been completely mute in some lives), and to her, he finds he can express his deepest emotions. 

“Your separation anxiety doesn’t bother me,” she replies. “I like being with you.”

He grows annoyed when it seems like she doesn’t know what he’s actually saying. “It’s not that, it’s not separation anxiety, it’s something else, an entirely different feeling. Like when you think about how different your life would be if you had made a different choice at a certain time, you know?”

She gives him a funny look, her nose slightly scrunched. She’s given him the same look dozens of times, in past lives, but he likes this one the most, because it’s his. “That makes no sense.”

“Like, without you, I don’t really have a purpose. My other lives are so miserable without you.”

“What are you talking about?”

He sighs and lets the topic drop, she starts talking about how they should go someplace exotic for their anniversary. In this life she doesn’t know as much about their other lives, and it bothers him. It isn’t her fault, is it, but he feels like it is. He just goes quiet while she talks, and tries to find comfort in her presence because he knows that his next life will be without her. It isn’t hard, she practically radiates sunshine and happiness, but though he adores her with every fiber of his body he wishes that they could be truly connected, like they have been before.

——

“You once had orange hair, I’m sure of it,” she says to him in another life. She brushes a strand of his loose hair from his eyes, so she can see them. 

“I can’t picture myself with orange hair,” he says. “Sometimes I wonder what I’d look like with black or white hair. But orange?”

She pauses for a moment to think. Going back that far in her memory is hard, once she reaches a certain point things start blurring together very badly until it’s all a jumbled mess of princesses and heroes and things that happened but not to her. “You got it from your mother, I think, because only your soul stays the same, never your body.”

He frowns, more with his eyes than his mouth. They cloud over slightly, like they do when she tries to explain something complicated but he can’t understand. And he is silent.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” she says quickly, hoping to lighten the mood. “It was nothing, really. You have very nice hair as is, and although you would look good regardless of what color your hair is…” she trails off, unsure what she was trying to say. “It doesn’t matter.”

——

Soulmates, is that the right word? Has she finally found the right word to describe them? No, for whatever reason that word seems too cheap. Maybe there is a word in a lost language that would describe them. She couldn’t think of one even if she tried.

He’s suggested that they’re spiritual lovers, and she laughs at the idea of it. What is that even supposed to mean, she asks, and he shrugs because he does not know, it just sounds fancy. So they argue about what they are to each other, until all words are discarded for being pretentious or imperfect or just not enough. It takes them years, ages, more lifetimes than most people are lucky to have until they find the right ones, because one word can’t do it all, can it? The special words take on a whole new meaning for each other, one that is impossible to put into words but is easy to understand.

“I love you.” I love being apart from you, because I need a reminder sometimes that I take you, and us, for granted, even if it hurts me to my core and makes me so utterly miserable I will be satisfied with nothing less than death.

“And I love you, too.” And I love being with you, because being apart is so hard, so hard on my poor heart, that no matter how much I drown it out it still demands to be felt unless we are alive with each other.

**Author's Note:**

> This weird stream-of-consciousness fic spawned from another idea I had, one that I’ll get around to one of these days bc I’m absolute garbage at finishing things I start. Basically I just kinda wondered what their lives are like when they’re reincarnated separately, if that even happens. I apologize for the confusing-ness of it all, it made more sense in my head lol.
> 
> I hope y’all are doing alright, I’m going crazy and I still have two weeks of quarantine left. I’m going to die.
> 
> Thanks for reading :)


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